The first thought that came to mind when I heard that 30 Rock was doing a live show was: "hey, what a great idea considering what the show is built upon!" I'm guessing I was in some sort of minority, because in reality, doing a live version of a scripted show -- any scripted show -- would be impossible if not ridiculously difficult to pull off. And yet, because of the show's concept, and because the show has Tina Fey -- whose writing exploits I frequently adore -- 30 Rock was in a unique position to do the impossible, Joss Whedon style.
And do it they did. Though the plots were skeleton sketches compared to a typical episode of the show, they necessarily had to be in order to allow the actors room to sketch out the jokes for themselves. I was delighted at the wonderful amount of soul-searching occurring in the episode -- by going live, the show and its creative team was forced to find out just what was so gosh darn funny about the show from the beginning.
For that, I can at least mostly credit the cast. I'm among the legions who has a major screen crush on Tina Fey, but everyone was on their A-game in this one, from Tracy Morgan's hilarious attempts to sabotage the show by breaking character to Jack McBrayer's Kenneth constantly cracking up at an "I'm with stupid" shirt to Alec Baldwin for, well, being Alec Baldwin. I'll admit freely in this reflection to not being a regular 30 Rock viewer, so I'm not entirely sure if Baldwin's Jack character mimicking his wife's inability to drink during pregnancy was part of an on-going story involving his home life, but the various failures at being off alcohol led to him sticking his nose down Jane Krakowski's mouth. That was more than enough to convince me of the humor in the situation.
The final touch that I really enjoyed about the episode was the meta-humor. I'm going to touch on meta-fictional television sometime in the future, but for this episode in particular, the meta-humor is what really helped the show transcend both pre-taped/scripted and live television and gave it a flavor that makes me pine for more live scripted shows in a way that reality television could never do. It was also a very convenient way to slide a viewer into the show by subtly pointing out right from the beginning that something was "off", then send us back home with a final taped shot of Tina and Alec.
Given the heavy SNL leanings of the show, it shouldn't come as a big surprise that this episode worked as well as it did. But it's still an accomplishment, and I'm willing to grant it that. So this post is one big kudos to the 30 Rock cast, crew, etc. not only for pulling off a live show, but for reminding me why this show is funny and fun to watch.
Blamo!
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